She has been giving information for eleven and a half thousand years.

She has just changed the form in which she gives it.

The Resolution That Science Can Offer

The headline that brought you here promised a lost branch of the first Americans revealed by DNA.

The resolution to that promise is this:

The genome of USR1 — the infant from Upward Sun River, buried in a hearth in interior Alaska approximately 11,500 years ago — revealed that she belonged to a genetic lineage that was basal to all other sampled Native American populations.

This lineage, described as Ancient Beringian by the researchers who analyzed the genome, represented a branch of the Native American founding population that diverged from the ancestors of other Native Americans approximately 20,000 years ago — during the Beringian standstill period, before the main southward expansion of the founding population began.